Anybody experience similar weirdness with the stomach 'flu?

[Blessed_Mom]

Hi,

I am looking for some experiences, assurances or knowledge of what's going on since I am completely baffled.

About 3+ weeks back my DD 2.5 yrs old got up in the morning vomiting all over the place...we took her to the ped who said she has a stomach bug and to expect 1 day of hurling and 2 days of diarrhea and a low-grade fever.

She had exactly the same symptoms but the diarrhea was mild and stayed with her for about 2 days after which she was having explosive poops which seemed like she was pooping all that she ate.

For almost 1.5 weeks after that she kept hurling a couple of her meals. Gradually she lost weight and in 2 weeks she lost about 1.5 pounds.....the weird thing is even after she recovered...instead of putting on weight...seemed like she kept losing. It has been 3 weeks and overall she has lost 2 pounds now. Unfortunately she was a peanut to begin with and now I can see her ribs :(

When is she supposed to start gaining weight again. It has been nearly a month since... I feel like she is not absorbing nutrients...

Another thing is she has many allergies ..dairy, wheat, egg , chocolate, corn etc.... but lately she had showed symptoms of losing them, especially the dairy. But since the stomach bug ..the allergy seems to have regressed badly and she is getting hives on contact (where as 1 month back she could eat half an ice-cream)

We suspect she may have had either the noro virus or the rota virus (although the symptoms were rather mild...but still it could be rota too because her poops were very stinky for about a week)

Now..anyone faced something similar? Any experiences? How did your toddler get better after the stomach bug and how long did it take and did you do anything to heal them and did they lose weight and when did they start gaining it back????

Please mamas...any help would be hugely appreciated.

And if anyone has experience with an allergic toddler getting stomch bug then that would be extra helpful.....TIA

[smokeylo]

Sounds like a nasty virus. She may still be dehydrated. My daughters had a terrible stomach virus last year that left them depleted for quite awhile, although neither lost significant weight (and neither has allergies, so). Will she take probiotics on food? That might help.... I don't know, I'm out of my depth here, but I do know that a bad illness can seem to have effects for a long time.

[hildare]

it takes a lot longer than recovery from the illness for the internal flora to get back to where it was before the illness, just in my experience. 

we recently had a horror of an illness, but for dd it was just diarrhea and briefly, but her guts are still gassy and she had some really messy poops for around a week afterwards.  i've been giving her yogurt and kefir, which is all i can think of to do besides give her a low sugar/low fat diet for a while to make digestion easier.

my kid didn't lose that much weight though.  in your case i would try to feed very calorie rich foods as much as possible.. avocados etc.

[MommyBecky]

Honestly, this sounds like the beginning of celiac.

[fizgig]

Wow I came here to ask almost the exact same question.  DS (2.10) has only been really sick for almost 2 weeks but he just doesn't seem to be recovering from the bug he had.  He vomited for 3 days but still has wet poops that smell terrible and is not wanting to eat much.

He also has lots of allergies and was recently able to tolerate new things but now even the smallest exposure to something and he gets sick all over again.  He is also small, and also loosing weight! 

MommyBecky, could you elaborate?  Would celiac hit so suddenly like this?

[MommyBecky]

Well, none of my children have shown signs of celiac yet (and hopefully never as my DH has a corn sensitivity and I don't want to deal with both), but there is a lot of it in the extended family, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents, etc. My MIL said you can have it and show no symptoms but there are sensitive periods where it can show up. The ages she mentioned were something like 2-3 y/o, puberty, college age.

The first time I ever heard of celiac years ago was a little granddaughter of someone I was visiting. They described her getting what they thought was a "stomach bug" but it just wouldn't go away and kept bothering her. After months of this, they discovered she was celiac. So, your story reminds me of my first "encounter" with celiac. That combined with the fact that your DD already has sensitivities (celiacs are more likely to have other sensitivities  and have them run in their family- like milk/corn) and the fact that they have gotten worse lately.

The other possibility is that she has gluten intolerance, which means she would not test positive for celiac but wouldn't be able to have gluten. Just read a study that found these (celiac and gluten intolerance) are two different but related issues.  I've also read that you can be prone to something like celiac and something can happen to kind of "set it off."

That said, I got really sick in HS and I did not have celiac. It was like you said- not absorbing nutrients and sometimes throwing up. Turns out I had a milk sensitivity.

There is a lot of info out there about celiac if you google it. It does require some wading, though.

Does this answer your question? Good luck!

[andromedajulie]

With my LO I have also experienced it taking her up to 2 weeks to return to food-normal after an otherwise complete recovery of a GI illness.

However, your comments about her sensitivity to a previous allergy food on contact definitely SOUNDS LIKE ALLERGIES!!! to me. We are struggling with elimination diet currently. I would say that post-sickness she might be more sensitive to her current allergies.

If you are anywhere near Ewing NJ, my family doc is awesome with nutrition and allergies - good luck Mama!

[Super~Single~Mama]

My son had something similar, he was throwing up for almost 2 weeks once. He has always been very robust, so even though he lost weight it was not alarming.

To get her hydrated, try to mix some unflavored pedialyte with a tad apple juice. I did 60% pedialyte with 40% apple juice - the less juice the better but pedialyte tastes really gross (DO NOT buy the flavored ones!!  Just the plain one mixed with some juice - apple worked best and tasted best).  The juice sweetened it so that it didn't taste bad, but he still got the nutrients in the pedialyte that helped re-hydrate him.

Getting hydrated fast is what really helped him to heal finally (and me being in charge of feeding - my ex gave him stuff like peaches which just destroyed any healing that happened). Then give it time, and do what you can to give her small amounts of high calorie dense food.